Street, Shrine, Square, and Soccer Pitch Comparative Protest Spaces in Asia and the Middle East

ASPJ Africa & Francophonie - 4th Quarter 2013 Street, Shrine, Square, and Soccer Pitch Comparative Protest Spaces in Asia and the Middle East TERESITA CRUZ-DEL ROSARIO, PHD* JAMES M. DORSEY shrine to the Virgin Mary on a once empty parking lot on the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) symbolizes Filipino people power. It lies at the intersection with Ortigas Avenue, the main thoroughfare that cuts across the upper and middle class as well as expatriate commercial and residential areas of San Juan and Pasig, just shy of the Asian Develop- Ament Bank. EDSA is Manila’s gateway, a 26-kilometer stretch of asphalt and concrete that traverses the city’s eight municipalities from Caloocan City in the north to Pasay City in the south. It is no coincidence that the shrine rose at this particular intersection as a site for secular pilgrims in search of a home for their moral vision. Soccer stadiums, thousands of miles to the west from where ancestors of the Arab community in the Philippines and Southeast Asia set sail, symbolize the battle in the Middle East and North Africa for political freedom; economic op- portunity; ethnic, religious, and national identity; and gender rights. The soccer *Dr. Teresita Cruz-del Rosario was a visiting associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, where she taught graduate courses in Development Policy in Southeast Asia and Social Movements in Asia. She obtained her PhD in sociology from Boston College in Massachusetts, where she wrote her dissertation on three Philippine uprisings. She also obtained her master’s degree in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a master’s degree in social anthropology from the Har- vard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is an award- winning foreign correspondent whose career focuses on ethnic, religious, and social conflict with a particular emphasis on the Middle East and North Africa. A widely published syndicated columnist, he is the author of the acclaimed blog The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccerand a speaker at major international academic and policy conferences. This article is based upon a paper presented at the first workshop on Asia’s Civil Spheres: New Media, Urban Public Space, Social Movements; Asian Research Institute; National University of Singapore, 29–30 September 2011. 80 STReet, SHRINE, SQUARE, AND SOCCER PITCH 81 pitch (the playing field) constituted a world in which the game was played as much on as off the pitch. Until the eruption of the Arab revolt in December 2010, the stadium—alongside the mosque—was the only alternative public space avail- able for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration against regimes dominated by military and security forces. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant soccer fans prepared for a day in which their organiza- tion, militancy, and street-battle experience would serve them in the final show- down with autocratic rulers determined to hang on to power. Soccer had its own unique thrill—a high-stakes game of cat and mouse be- tween militant enthusiasts and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup: the future of a region. The soccer match offered the disenfranchised a voice in an environment of forced silence and official misrepresentation, challenged the political and social boundaries set by authoritarian regimes, and thrived on goalposts enlarged by globalization. Nonviolent revolts such as those in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Morocco have changed and are changing the political landscape in emerging nations. Protestors transform public spaces—what William Sewell calls “spatial agency”—from constrained physical landscapes into venues of people power.1 The revolts in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Cairo, Tunis, Manama, Amman, Casablanca, and Sana’a turned pedestrian streets, corridors, avenues, and roundabouts into stages for uninhibited political expression. Many of these venues have acquired the aura of a holy ground, a pilgrimage site where protestors seek redemption and deliverance from various forms of social and political injustice. This article compares the various protest spaces in Asia and the Middle East. Whether street, square, or soccer pitch, these sites have created the political archi- tecture for collective enactment as protestors across both regions turn the constraints of a built-up environment to their political advantage in a unique act of shared creativity aimed at advancing the social and political struggle. In doing so, protestors refashion political meanings and reconstruct and renovate physical spaces. They convert them into battlefields over competing visions of the future of a country or region with demands for greater transparency, accountability, accom- modation, and tolerance. They turn them into venues that give a voice to the disenfranchised and provide a unique platform for building bridges across gaping divides. The article projects EDSA and the soccer stadium as venues of political enactment. Over a matter of years, both became the stages for political expression in an environment of repression and autocratic rule. It employs Sewell’s notions of 82 ASPJ AFRICA & FRANCOPHONIE “spatial structure” and “spatial agency,” both based on Dingxin Zhao’s description of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square as the ideal ecology for a student protest, to ex- plore EDSA and the soccer stadium as perfect settings for popular uprisings.2 The term shrine connotes a demarcation in people’s minds. For Filipinos, EDSA is a sort of political “promised land” perceived in terms of time, place, and sentiment. For Middle Easterners and North Africans, the soccer stadium represents the reclamation of dignity and the assertion of identity in a show of strength and force bolstered by numbers. Street, Shrine, Stadium, and Era The shrine was erected within a year after the first Filipino uprising in 1986 to commemorate what many Filipinos see as a shining moment in their history. A gigantic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary painted in gold rose on an elevated portion of the parking lot. Her image is a reminder of the first supposed EDSA miracle in which rosaries, statues, scapulars, and medals bearing her image stopped the tanks of President Ferdinand Marcos and ended his 21-year dictatorship. Mass is held in a chapel beneath her statue. Surrounding the chapel are shopping malls, high-rise condominiums, a bus stop, and an underground parking lot. A flyover above the shrine and across both avenues affords commuters and passengers a full view of the Virgin Mary, a religious reminder of the sanctity of popular protest in a world of hypersecularism. The shrine is large enough to contain a stage. The anniversary of the people- power uprising was celebrated every February with a Mass officiated by the late Archbishop Jaime Sin and a host of other church luminaries, followed by a pro- gram recalling the dramatic events of the four-day uprising. Key actors return to the shrine garbed in the clothes they wore during the protests, embellished by flab and wrinkles acquired with each passing year. After the reenactments, the stage is transformed into an entertainment platform with showbiz celebrities celebrating Marcos’s departure from the Philippines. The combination of pious, political, and leisure activities marks the popular uprising as an ecclesiastically approved kind of political struggle-cum-all-night-revelry. The Ecology of EDSA In the consideration of contentious politics, Sewell notes the vital role of spatial structures: “Geographical structures [that] might be regarded as parallel to economic structures, occupational structures, political structures, or demographic structures—that is, as entrenched facts of social life that have their own autono- STReet, SHRINE, SQUARE, AND SOCCER PITCH 83 mous (or at least relatively autonomous) logics and that determine or at least tightly constrain social action.”3 Echoing Anthony Giddens, Sewell argues fur- ther that although structures are “durable and constraining,” they also provide an enabling effect that allows “humans to reproduce themselves and their social world . [and] also are subject to transformation as a consequence of the very social action that they shape.” In studying contentious politics, Sewell directs at- tention to spatial agency—the ways in which protestors confront the constraints of space and convert these into political advantages that will advance the social struggle, refashion political meanings, and restructure the “strategic valence of space.”4 Thus, while space is characterized by immobile fixtures, it is also subject to reconstruction. Protestors create, produce, and renovate space—not just to im- bue fresh meanings to it but to convert it into a strategic resource that transforms the overall environment for protest. If the soccer stadium, with its enclosed infrastructure designed to evoke competition, passion, rivalry, and confrontation, is a natural site for an uprising, then EDSA would seem at first glance a strange, if not curious, venue for protest. Unlike China’s expansive Tiananmen Square or Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo, EDSA in 1986 was a comparatively narrow six-lane highway divided by an island that organized, albeit unconvincingly, the flow of traffic. Instead of a vast quad- rangle on which most collective action tends to take place, EDSA is a long, narrow asphalt worm traversing metropolitan Manila that hosts thousands of vehicles transporting urbanites across the city. The omnipresence of vehicular traffic alone would already pose a ready-made limitation to any massive gathering. EDSA’s long stretch of highway is an artery fed by thousands of road capil- laries that run in both directions, making it easy for the public to get to the highway from anywhere. A network of commercial establishments—shops, eateries, banks, and hotels—as well as outdoor vendors hawking towels, bottled water, cigarettes, paper fans, and snacks abets the road network.

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